Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Sexual Reorientation Do or Die

Promotion for 37th Annual Exodus Freedom Conference

The recent report of the closing of Exodus International, a
group devoted to curing homosexuality and lesbianism, is another nail in the
coffin of “the ex gay” movement. The
Times reported that that “on the opening night of the group’s 38th
annual conference…Exodus International announced that the organization would
disband, amidgrowing skepticism among
its top officials and board members that sexual attractions can be changed,”
(“After 37 Years of Trying to Change People’s Sexual Orientation, Group Is to Disband, “ NYT, 6/20/13). Apart from the complex issue of if and how sexuality
can be changed (do you deprogram a homosexual in the way you do a kid who has
joined a cult?), the biggest question that remains is why call a convention, in
which people ostensibly have to spend money on hotel rooms, only to announce
the termination of the very thing for which the convention is going to be
called? Wouldn’t that lead to having a a lot of unhappy people milling around
the hotel, not to speak of the disgruntled attendees from other parts of the
country and abroad who’d had to expend considerable sums on air fare? Why not
simply announce that that the convention was cancelled on the internet so that
potential attendees could make other plans or seek out other organizations
whose leadership was not filled with quitters, but with the kind of do or die
types that would give sexual reorientation the old college try?

About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.